Undersea Cable Landing Sites

Glimmerglass solutions have been deployed to remotely provision, protect and monitor all wavelengths at the juncture of the undersea cable and the land-based fiber plant.

The Challenge

Submarine fiber optic cables provide the vast majority of intercontinental network bandwidth. Most cables support hundreds of thousands, or even millions, of simultaneous voice calls and Internet traffic, due to the adoption of DWDM technology for transmission. Because of their importance to global networks, redundant fiberoptic paths have been deployed to lessen outages resulting from cable breaks and equipment failures. However, even with redundancy, the time to repair is still unacceptably long and due to booming traffic growth, the impact of a service outage is exponentially greater than it used to be. Because of this, maintaining service availability at the remote cable landing sites, where the undersea cables join the terrestrial network, is a prime concern.

The Solution

Glimmerglass systems provide a full non-blocking, transparent cross-connect that can rapidly and remotely reconfigure any optical path, regardless of wavelength. At a landing site, this connectivity permits optical layer connections between the wet side and dry side to be re-provisioned in milliseconds from the Network Operations Center with a few clicks of a mouse. These advantages enable submarine cable operators to improve network availability and reduce operational costs while, at the same time, create a network that is easier to manage and better positioned for future upgrades.

Improve network resiliency. The Glimmerglass Intelligent Optical Switch provides means for routing around multiple failures on an optical transport path, as well as maintaining protection schemes during transponder upgrades.

Reduce OPEX. Optical layer testing and restoration can be performed rapidly and from a remote location – downgrading emergency repairs to scheduled maintenance calls.

Remain future-ready. Glimmerglass Intelligent Optical Systems can rapidly and remotely manage light paths without regard for data format, line rate or wavelength count. This means, among other benefits, that operators can more easily expand their legacy ring-based undersea networks into a logical, intelligent, optical mesh network.

Protect your investment. The ‘transparency’ of Glimmerglass photonic switching means that the switching fabric that manages 10G transponders today can also support 40G and 100G transponders in the future without hardware or software upgrades.